Chapter 13: Martyrdom

Idon’t think anyonereally knew what to do with themselves. We’ve all spent the best part of four years training as hard as we could to be inhumanly selfish in a way we could only possibly live with because all of us were going round in fear for our lives—if not in the next five minutes then on graduation day at the latest—and you could tell yourself everyone else was doing the same and there wasn’t any other choice. The Scholomance had encouraged it if anything. Everyone-for-themselves worked well enough to get 25 percent of the students out through the unending horde: I suppose up until now that had been the school’s best option. And yes, it now very clearly meant for us to start collaborating instead, but a large building might not understand that human beings have a bit more difficulty shifting their mindset. I wouldn’t have been surprised if all the enclavers had pulled out instantly. I wouldn’t have been surprised if literally everyone had pulled out instantly. In fact I expected the library to empty out within two minutes of my announcement, theatrics or no.

Then Orion said, “I could come back? Whenever it needed to be cleaned out again?” He didn’t even make it sound appropriately martyr-like; just threw the idea out there as if that were a perfectly reasonable option for us all to consider. I glared at him, but it did have the effect of making a lot of other people shuffle uncomfortably.

“Yeah,” Aadhya said. “Look, Orion, we all know you’re practically invincible, but that’s not the same as totally invincible. If you keep hopping in through the gates, sooner or later some mal will get lucky.”

“They haven’t yet,” he said, perfectly sincere.

“Eleven times, Lake,” I said through my teeth. “This year alone.”

“I would’ve had them!” Orion said.

We were both ready to pursue that line of discussion further, but Liesel headed us off. “Don’t be stupid,” she said loudly. “And give us back some decent light.” That was directed to the room at large, and the library lamps instantly put themselves right again, as if they were as afraid as the rest of us to refuse her marching orders. “We must help. Do you not understand?” She slapped the letters. “The purpose of the school is to protect wizard children. But if we are in no danger, we do not need protection. This obviously creates a thaumaturgic flow towards protecting the other children.”

I felt that obviously was a strong and unjustifiable word in this context—as, I suspect, did three-quarters of the people in the room—but Liesel wasn’t pausing to take questions. “If we do not assist the school to help the younger children, then the flow will create an incentive for the school to trade away our extreme safety to improve theirs. For instance,” she added pointedly, in response to the blank expressions all round, “it may begin to lock us out of the cafeteria. Or turn off the plumbing in our bathrooms. Or if another maw-mouth should enter the school, open the wards to direct it towards our dormitory.”

We’d all got the point by then. I’m not sure it was any better if everyone else was forced to help by the school instead of by me lying to them, but I couldn’t help being grateful that everyone had a good reason to do it. It didn’t feel as wrong as me lying them into it, anyway. It was fair, as much as anything in the hideous bargain of the Scholomance is fair: if you had offered any of us a deal at the beginning of the year, that we could just walk out of the graduation hall at the price of going filthy and hungry for three months, eating nothing but what we could beg or trade from the other kids, we’d have taken it like a shot. You could fatten yourself back up as soon as you were safe at home.

“Okay, so—” Aadhya said after a moment. “This is all because the cleansing machinery worked. So we just need to find a way to keep it working, for good.”

That did sound promising, but Alfie said, “Oh, bugger,” half under his breath, and then said, “You can’t. The cleansing machinery can’t be preserved. You can fix it, but you can’t keep it working. Four years is the absolute most you can get. The agglos will do for it by then.”

“The agglos?” Aadhya said. We all think of agglos as party favors rather than maleficaria. Technically, they do need mana and they can’t build it themselves, but they never hurt anyone. They just creep around very slowly and collect any stray bits of mana-infused creations that have been left out and then tack them onto their outer carapaces, like oversized caddisflies. We’d all be delighted to meet a fully grown one that’s been accumulating scraps of artifice and alchemical products for a decade or so. Which is why you never do meet agglos in the classroom levels, except the tiny larval ones. But there are colonies of grown ones in the graduation hall, like the group I’d seen. They hide until graduation is over, and after all the other mals are well fed and snoring, they creep out and collect up all the tidy bits that got dropped by the students who didn’t make it out.

Alfie ran a hand over his face. “They get through the outer shell and just gnaw on the machinery until it breaks.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Aadhya said. She wasn’t by any means the only artificer looking baffled. “Why don’t you throw a five-minute warding on it? They’re just agglos!”

“That’s why you can’t ward them out,” Alfie said. “Mortal flame is—well, it’s arguably an entity, and one that consumes mana that it doesn’t make itself. If you want to conjure a mortal flame and send it out, you can’t ward the artifice you’re doing it with against mana-consuming creatures. You have to ward it against malice. But the agglos aren’t malicious. They never take mana against resistance. They just nibble on this thing we’ve left sitting out near them, and sooner or later they make a hole in it, and then they squirm inside and take bits of it until the whole thing comes apart. London enclave’s got a laboratory with an agglo farm that’s been looking for ways to keep them out for the last century. If we could, it would be worth doing anything, spending any amount of mana, to get another team in to do a real repair. But we can’t find anything that works for longer than bloody wrapping the thing in tinfoil—the agglos like that stuff so much they’ll eat all of it before they bother going into the artifice. And that would get you four years.”

We stood around dumbly for some time after he finished. The cleansing was so stuck in all our heads as the obvious thing to fix that even after Alfie’s explanation, at least half a dozen people opened their mouths to suggest some other way to do it, only none of them managed more than “What if…” before they realized that whatever their clever notion was, the brightest minds of London had already thought of and tried it at some point in the last hundred years.

“What if we just fix it every year from now?” one of Aadhya’s acquaintances from Atlanta said finally, the first one to make it past the sticking point. “A crew could go down right after New Year’s, when the hall is freshly cleaned, and,” picking up enthusiasm, “we could make it the same deal as last year. Anyone who signs on for the fix gets a spot, enclave of their choice. Right? People would go for it.”

He was absolutely right; some desperate kids would go for it, year after year, losing a few each time but keeping the machinery tidy, until finally one group went down only to discover that surprise! The machinery had finally broken again before they could fix it, and there was a hungry crowd of maleficaria waiting for them. I was about to put up a howl of protest, but Alfie was already shaking his head, in weary exasperation. “They’ve thought of that. Posting guards, sending in maintenance crews every month, all of it. And that would handle the agglos. But you can’t pay anyone enough to do it, because a new maw-mouth will come into the school, very soon. There’s a trace on the doors. Usually one or two manage it every year—they’re oozes, those are always the hardest to keep out of anywhere. And they’ll set up shop in the hall. Patience and Fortitude were protecting us, actually. They would eat the newer ones.”

Everyone’s faces had downturned into masks of appalled horror; I cringed inwardly and tried to tell myself that it wasn’t very long until graduation, and surely there wouldn’t be a new maw-mouth that soon.

“What if we breed some mals to eat agglos?” some bright lad blurted out, I didn’t see who; I think he ducked away behind someone else as soon as he realized what he’d suggested and everyone turned to stare in his direction. Breeding maleficaria is a very popular pastime for maleficers, because it always ends in roughly the same way, with variation only in the amounts of screaming and blood. Trying to do it with good intentions generally makes the results worse, not better.

“We could build a construct to do it,” someone else suggested, which also wasn’t going to work, since the other mals coming in would happily eat the agglo-eating constructs, but at least that was less likely to create some kind of hideous monstrosity shambling around the school devouring kids forever.

But more to the point, it was another suggestion, and the crowd in the reading room was breaking up into small groups along preferred language lines and starting to argue and discuss, to come up with ideas. Trying to help. I didn’t care that all the ideas were useless; we’d literally only just started thinking.

Aadhya came round to me and put her arm round my waist and said under her breath, “Hey, she can be taught,” with a tease in her voice that wobbled a little, and when I looked at her, her eyes were bright and wet, and I put my arm round her shoulders and hugged her.

---

I did begin to care that the ideas were useless after an entire week went by without any useful ones. We’d enlisted the whole school in the brainstorming project, but so many people came up to the reading room to suggest that someone go down to fix the machinery on some arbitrary day each year that by Tuesday we were all yelling, “Maw-mouth!” before they got halfway through their first sentence. All of these clever people were enclavers, I note.

A junior came up to propose our staying on an extra year to guard the other students. He called his idea paying it forward, and it had the novelty of making literally every senior in the room squirm with a violently stifled shove it up your arse even before Liesel said in exasperation, “And where will we be sleeping during this year? What will we eat?” He then revised it to suggest that we come back in just in time for next year’s graduation. That didn’t even merit a response beyond a flat stare: no one has ever volunteered to come back into the Scholomance, and no one ever will. Barring the one incredibly stupid glaring exception, who didn’t count.

For variation, one pale and bedraggled-looking freshman girl came up with the notion that all of the underclassmen should graduate with us, instead. I think she just couldn’t stand school any longer and wanted to go home to her mum, and fair enough, except that her plan wouldn’t have protected and sheltered her at all. She’d just be snapped up in a few months by some mal on the outside, like ninety-five percent of the wizard kids who aren’t lucky enough to get into the school. We more or less gave her a bracing pat on the shoulder and sent her on her way, and that was all the time we alloted to her suggestion.

But that afternoon as I was leaving lunch I saw her slumped in the freshman queue, standing alone, and on an impulse, I stopped by Sudarat, who was alone in the queue just a little further back. “Come on,” I said. “You’ve got someone holding a place for you.”

She trailed after me uncertainly, and I took her over to the other girl: she was an American, but just an indie, and I vaguely thought she was from Kansas, or one of those other states you never hear about on the BBC news, far from any enclaves. The point being, she didn’t have a smidge of a reason to care about what had or hadn’t happened to Bangkok. “Right, what’s your name?” I demanded, and the girl said warily, “Leigh?” as if she wasn’t quite willing to commit.

“Right, this is Sudarat, she was from Bangkok before it went pear-shaped; you’re Leigh, and you’re so miserable in this place that you’d rather trade for the odds outside; that’s introductions sorted,” I said, getting the worst bits out in front, for the both of them. “See if you can bear to sit together; it’s best to have company for meals.”

I sailed away and left them to it as quickly as I could, so none of us including me could think too hard about what the bloody hell I was doing. I don’t think I could have done it, even a week before. I wouldn’t have imagined doing it, I wouldn’t have imagined either one of them letting me do it: a senior putting two underclassmen together, why? I’d need to have an angle, and if I hadn’t an obvious one, they would have made one up for me, and more likely than not actively avoided each other afterwards.

Maybe they still would: Sudarat had more reason than most to be wary, and I didn’t know a thing about the Kansas girl beyond her being as miserable as I’d once been, which might mean anything. Maybe she, too, was secretly a proto-maleficer of unimaginable dark power, or maybe she was such a reflexively nasty person that everyone avoided her for good reason—I immediately thought of dear old Philippa Wax, back in the commune, who almost certainly hadn’t got any nicer just because I wasn’t there, although she’d often implied she would—or maybe Leigh from Kansas was just a loser kid who was shy and bad at making friends, and who had nothing going for her, so no one had bothered to make a friend of her. She wasn’t an actual maleficer, because a maleficer wouldn’t have been that desperate to get out.

Anyway, Sudarat could decide for herself if it was worth enduring her company. At least it was someone, someone who wasn’t going to be suspicious of her, or even just hesitant to make a friend of her because other people were suspicious of her. And I could imagine trying to help her, and help the other girl into the bargain, because that was now a thing that could happen in the Scholomance.

Assuming that they actually did sit together for at least that one meal, it was also the most successful example of help that entire week, at least that I knew of.

There were any number of charming additional proposals for maleficaria-breeding, some of which got so far as to include detailed specs. One alchemy-track kid actually had the gall to suggest to Liu that he could do it with our mice: enchant them and leave them all living forever in the pipes of the Scholomance to breed and eat agglo larvae. Liu didn’t get angry very easily, but she did get angry then, to the point that Precious woke me up out of a nap and sent me racing to her room just in time to collide with Mr. Animal Cruelty, who beat an even more enthusiastic retreat when he saw me outside the door with Precious poking a quivering-whiskered nose out of the bandolier cup on my chest.

People also generated some less obviously bad ideas, like plans for installing some kind of major weaponry in the dead space under the workshop floor, which would be used to blast the graduation hall mals more directly. The problem was that anything you installed outside the graduation hall would require openings in the extremely powerful wards that keep the mals in the graduation hall and out of the classroom levels.

We were a fairly glum group as we gathered in the reading room the next Saturday. The obstacle course had reversed itself full-bore: instead of being impossible to survive, it had suddenly got so easy that even freshmen could manage it, so now they were doing runs instead of us. The school had in fact started randomly locking seniors out of the cafeteria, and the only way to get in was to give something useful to one of the younger kids. Small things like individual spare socks or pencils were working this week, but you could see the writing on the wall perfectly well. And grotesquely, of course most seniors were giving the things to enclave kids, in exchange for nothing more than the promise of putting a good word in with the enclave council when they graduated.

“All of the proposals are still trying to repair the cleansing,” Yuyan said, spreading the papers out over the tables. She’d taken over gathering them, because she could read so many languages so fluently, and because unlike Liesel she didn’t traumatize people with her comments, so we’d got a lot more submitted after she put out the word that people should bring them to her. “I think we have to accept that the cleansing approach to graduation is just a failure. We need something different.”

“Yeah, well, we’re trying,” Aadhya said grimly. I knew she’d been in the shop almost all week with Zixuan and a bunch of the other top artificers of our year, trying to come up with things. “We’ve experimented with making a corridor to the gates—like a tunnel of safety. But…” She shook her head. She didn’t really need to say what the problems with that strategy were: you’d be offering a single irresistible target to every last one of the mals, and how did you decide who went first? “Anyway, it still feels too obvious. The grown-ups would have tried something like that before.”

“Hey—here’s a thought. What if we did all graduate?” Chloe said. “What if we bring all the younger kids out with us. When we graduate back to the New York induction point, Orion’s mom will be there—she can get the board of governors to cancel induction. If we did that, the school really would stay clear, because no mals would try to come in if there weren’t any of us inside. And then instead of just us trying to come up with something, we could have every wizard in the world thinking about a better solution.”

Yuyan sighed. “We have been thinking about it, for years,” she said, which made sense: if Shanghai had been able to develop a better solution, it would have been worth their building a new school, and everyone would have moved. She gestured to the nearest copy of the newspaper article, mounted against the end of one of the stacks. “London has been thinking about it for a century, and New York nearly that long. Nothing we’ve found gets us better odds than the Scholomance.”

“Well, okay, but if we can’t think of anything better, at least nobody is any worse off,” Chloe said.

“The younger children would be,” Liu said. “They’d be out there undefended.”

“Just for a little while—it could be like summer vacation. We could all help look out for them. And if it turns out there isn’t a fix, or it takes too long, they could come back in,” Chloe said.

“Would you?” Nkoyo said, with an edge I felt in my own gut. “Come back in? After you’d got out of here?”

Chloe paused. “Well,” she said, with a wobble. “They’d get to choose…” but it was only a faint protest, fading off.

Liu was sitting on the couch next to her; she leaned over and bumped shoulders with Chloe, comfortingly. “We should send the mals to school instead,” she said.

Ten minutes before curfew that night, she came and banged furiously on my door. I didn’t know it was Liu, so I jumped out of bed and threw up a major shield, got a killing spell ready, and yanked the door open ready to fight. I had to fling my arms to both sides as she lunged in and grabbed me by the shoulders, with a few pieces of scribbled-on paper crumpled in her grip. First she said something in Chinese too fast for me to follow, because she was so excited, and then she said, “We should send the mals to school instead!”

“What?” I said, and the final curfew bell rang, and she jumped and said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow!” and ran back to her room, leaving me to lie awake for an hour trying to figure out what she was thinking. The crumpled papers she’d left with me didn’t help: I could tell it was maths, but it was all in Chinese numbers, in two sets of handwriting, hers and I thought Yuyan’s, and even after I laboriously translated them, I could only guess what the numbers were referring to.

“The honeypot spell,” she said, the next morning, meeting me halfway down the corridor between our rooms.

“Right, I got that far,” I said: mals come swarming into the school through the graduation portals anyway; if we used our honeypot spell, we could lure a proper horde of them in. Theoretically tens of thousands over the half an hour of graduation, if Liu’s calculations were right and I’d understood them properly. “But what’s the idea? Are you thinking if we pack the whole hall completely full of mals, they’ll—eat the agglos?” That was the best guess I’d come up with in a night of thinking, although if mals were going to eat enough of the agglos, they’d have eaten them already, but Liu was shaking her head vigorously.

“Not the hall,” she said. “The school. The whole school. We leave, and we fill the school with mals.”

I stared at her. “And then what? Boot it off into the void or something?”

“Yes!” Liu said.

“Er, what?” I said.

---

I could tell you all the details of the next two weeks, during which we came up with five or six alternative plans and discarded all of them, and also had about ten different false starts working out the rough details of this one, but it was agony enough going through it once, so I won’t.

The main question was whether Liu’s idea would in fact work to protect the wise-gifted children of the world. The Scholomance wasn’t built out of some kind of passionate dedication to the concept of boarding-school education. It’s just a casino, meant to tilt the odds in our favor, because surviving puberty is a numbers game. Any wizard parent can save their kid from any one mal. But when mals come fifteen a day, sooner or later one of them is going to slip through your wards and shields and gates and get the tasty treat you’re hiding from them.

And that’s why we get crammed in here instead, past the guarded gates and only reachable through the narrow pipes covered with wards, and why we spend a healthy chunk of our formative years in a prison out of nightmares. If we could cut down the maleficaria population enough to give us odds of survival outside the school that were as good as, oh, one in seven, most people wouldn’t come to the school to get the one-in-four odds here. It’s too horrible. And after Liesel pounced on poor Liu and dragged her into a room to check the calculations a few million times, the two of them came back and announced that we had a decent chance of getting the odds outside down to one in two, and they thought the effect would last for at least a couple of generations. That made it one of the few ideas on the list that couldn’t just immediately be crossed off, unlike for instance that morning’s suggestion of creating a flock of flying snake-tailed piranha vultures that would absolutely have polished off the agglos in ten minutes and then come up to start on the rest of us.

The rest of the issues with Liu’s plan were logistical. After poring over the blueprints and maintenance documentation, we worked out that when you touch the gates, your portal home opens at that precise moment, stays open just long enough to return you to your induction point, and then slams shut again in seconds—a sensible design meant to keep mals out. If we wanted to lure in as many mals as we could, everyone would have to queue up and leave slowly: a steady stream of kids going out, a steady stream of mals coming in, so we could keep the honeypot spell working through the full half hour of graduation.

Sorry, so I could keep the honeypot spell working. No one even bothered discussing who exactly was going to be casting the spell intended to call up a vast tidal army of maleficaria. Well, it was a fair cop.

“How are we going to keep the mals from just killing everyone in line?” Aadhya said.

“As long as the honeypot spell is going, they’re just going to follow it, I think,” Liu said.

“So El has to be somewhere far from where they come in, to pull them deeper,” Magnus said. “Can she cast the spell up in the library and still have it work at the gates?”

“How am I getting out of the library afterwards in this scenario?” I said pointedly. I was very conscious that if the school didn’t mind being hacked off into the void itself—it hadn’t raised any objections so far—it would certainly consider me expendable, too. I couldn’t refuse to risk my life, but I wasn’t keen on accepting martyrdom before we even began.

“For that matter, how are you just not getting smothered in five minutes?” Aadhya said. “If this even works, a billion mals are going to be coming right at you.”

“Why don’t I just kill them all as they come in?” Orion said, without the slightest doubt in his ability to kill a billion mals.

“Shut up, Lake,” I said, having many doubts about his ability to kill a billion mals.

That left Liu’s idea as just one of the many very-long-shot possibilities on our list, but Yuyan talked it up to Zixuan, and three days later, he came up to the library with a solution for the problem of luring the mals throughout the school: a speaker system. The idea of it was we’d make hundreds of tiny speakers—magic ones, not the electronic sort—strung on a line, and then run this line in a gigantic loop throughout the entire school, starting and ending in the graduation hall, through all the corridors and stairways on every level, branches going off into every classroom; up to the library and winding through all the endless stacks, and then all the way back down into the hall. At one end of the loop would be me, standing near the gates: I would sing our alluring honeypot spell into a capturing mouthpiece, and it would get piped through the entire system and come back out at the very last and largest speaker, standing right in front of the gates, to broadcast the song out to any mals in listening range of the portals.

What would make the mals actually follow the line and go into the school was a single brilliant twist to the design: an enchantment so you only heard the sound coming out of the one speaker just ahead of you, and as soon as you got too close to that one, you’d start to hear it only from the next speaker along instead. The mals would come because they heard the song being blasted out, and then they’d chase it onward to the next speaker, and the next one, all the way through the school.

That certainly made Liu’s plan seem tidy, until you considered that there would be more than four thousand kids going out the gates, spanning the whole globe, and with hundreds of them headed to the huge city enclaves that were surrounded by hungry maleficaria. Broadcasting a honeypot spell out of the Scholomance—already the most tempting honeypot in the world—would be gilding the lily. If any of the mals didn’t come, it would likely be because they’d got stampeded or eaten by other mals rushing to get to the suddenly wide-open doors, or because they couldn’t make it to a portal in time.

“We’d be luring in all the mals in the world,” Chloe said nervously, and she wasn’t wrong. It was obviously insane.

However, it still didn’t get crossed off the list, because we only crossed ideas off the list when we were sure they wouldn’t work, not just because they were mad. The list wasn’t long even so. Most of them came off when Alfie said, “Yes, tried that,” often without even taking his head off his fist where he was slumped next to Liesel at the head of the table; others got crossed off because Yuyan or Gaurav from Jaipur admitted their own enclave laboratories had tried it. Surprisingly, no one in any enclave had ever explored the brilliant idea of destroying the entire school.

More seriously, it was an idea that they couldn’t have come up with, because it needed—me. You could have cast the honeypot spell with a circle of twelve wizards, or thirty if you wanted it to keep going for half an hour, and then you could have taken another thirty wizards and cast a spell to break the school off from the world, but you certainly couldn’t have got them all out again in time. As it was, I’d be yelling the last syllable of what was turning out to be my surprisingly handy supervolcano spell as I was jumping through the portal, or else I’d go toppling off into the void with the school. Oh well; if that happened, hopefully the accumulated mals would eat me before I had an opportunity to experience the full existential horror of being totally severed from reality.

And no, I wasn’t nearly that blasé about the prospect.

But we hadn’t found any better ideas, other than Chloe’s solution of just running out and throwing the problem into the laps of the adults. We all liked that solution quite a lot: the only problem with it was that it didn’t provide us with any work to do, and meanwhile the Scholomance was impatiently tapping a metaphorical foot. Over the next week, Zixuan started actually tinkering around and building the speakers, and other senior artificers started asking to help him, because anyone who wasn’t helping in some way started having their already dim room lamps go completely out, or having the water shut off to the bathrooms just when they got there, or being shut out of the cafeteria or the workshop.

The school only got meaner from there. There didn’t seem to be any big dangerous mals left—if there were, Orion was undoubtedly nabbing them before anyone else caught a glimpse—but we were all shaking ratworms and cribbas out of our bedclothes and having to cast purifications every night or wake up with mallows infesting our tear ducts, and one morning we got to the cafeteria and the food line was nothing but vats of the original thin nutrient slurry until after the last senior went through.

I have to say, I have no idea how anyone survived eating it long enough to graduate. We all ended up eating mad things: full English breakfasts, waffles slathered in berries and whipped cream, shakshuka with gorgeous heaps of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers; Aadhya had this amazing thing her nani had invented, thin pancakes stuffed with a puree of cholar dal and topped with toasted meringue. Once you’re spending the extremely expensive amount of mana it takes to transmute a meal in the first place, you might as well transmute it into something you actually like. But we’d all had to spend a week’s worth of mana to do it.

After breakfast every last senior was fairly clamoring for something to do, and since we didn’t have anything better on offer, they all started to grab bits of Liu’s plan, because it was the only one that was far enough along to start doing work, and it began to lurch down the runway like a half-built plane that people were literally holding up and carrying while other people were still putting on the wheels and wings and seats, trying to get the steering and the engine in order, and other people were running after it carrying the luggage.

The artificers and the maintenance crews started spinning out the speaker cabling and running it through the school, and building the speakers themselves—Zixuan had got a prototype working just in time; they’d have stolen the sketchy designs and built dozens of wrong ones otherwise. We even got the first positive sign that the school was endorsing our demolition plan, because after a fight broke out in the workshop over the last coil of metal wire, one of the metal ceiling panels fell in painfully on the squabblers’ heads, like a pointed message.

After that, maintenance-track kids started ripping down less important panels throughout the school and delivering them to artificers in the workshop, who shredded them into speaker cabling and wound them onto fresh coils and handed them right back. Alchemists started brewing actual honeypot bait—seniors unexpectedly did prove willing to donate blood to this project, since, creepily, a 10ml syringeful turned out to be good enough to get you into every meal of the day—with the idea that we’d spread it in the dormitories to lure some of the mals off from the crowded main stream of the spell. Other seniors started dragging the younger kids down to the gym at regular intervals and making them pretend to queue up for the doors, so they could work out the right pacing.

Liu and Aadhya and I didn’t have to look far for work: we spent our mornings up in the library trying to find some better alternative plan, and our afternoons down in the workshop with Zixuan, tweaking the lute and the speakers and the mouthpiece—he was building that crucial bit himself—to work best with the honeypot spell. Yuyan migrated along with us. She was also a musician, and had offered to be backup for Liu on the lute, in case anything happened to stop her playing; they were practicing the song-spell together most nights. No one was going to be backup for me.

The furnaces were going full blast with all the other artificers frantically trying to do something, so it was hot and tedious work, and my voice was ragged and croaky by dinnertime every day. For consolation, it was quite good fun wagging eyebrows at Liu, who kept turning red with confusion—Zixuan was clearly running a determined campaign on that front alongside the engineering work; he found time during the process to make her a set of tidy little metal egg-shaped protective cages for the mice that would lock into the bandolier cups, for graduation, with a tiny little spell-extension hook on the top that would attach into our shield spells.

Chloe started spending her own afternoons brewing throat-cooler for me, and salve for Liu and Yuyan’s fingers, and invited other alchemists to join her. She ended up with more hands than the work needed, so she took the best of them and started working on developing a second recipe meant specifically to enhance the honeypot song-spell, which I hadn’t even known you could do with alchemy.

A few days later, she gave me the first tiny thimbleful to try. The honeypot spell had still been doing a wonderful job of summoning larval mals, by the way, and in case you were wondering what we did about it, the answer was that for the first week, we cast it from inside a ring of mortal flame I summoned, all the while pouring out buckets of sweat. But we gratefully stopped doing that after the first week, because the swarms stopped coming. By the time Chloe gave me the sample, we were pretty sure we’d completely cleared the workshop environs of every last living mal.

---

And we had, only an isk had apparently laid a batch of eggs in the workshop furnaces some time ago. They weren’t due to hatch for a decade or so yet, but after I drank Chloe’s potion, the enhanced song managed to persuade them to break their shells and come out anyway. Their exoskeletons hadn’t hardened yet, so they were just floppy and slow-moving squiggles of molten metal, not a direct threat, except as they came out of the furnace they fell to the floor, melted through, and vanished away into the void below. By the time we managed to smother the rest of them, the floor of the shop was looking like one of those tin cans someone had punched full of holes with an awl for decoration. We spent the rest of that day repairing it, very gingerly.

By the end of May, we were far enough along with all the pieces of the project that when Liesel chivvied us all up to the library for a review of all the various planning ventures, the one major practical issue left with Liu’s plan was how to get the horde of mals up from the graduation hall and into the main levels of the school.

Which was quite an issue, as the entire school was designed from the beginning to make that journey as difficult as possible for even a single mal. The maintenance shaft was going to be a tight fit for an entire horde, even if a juvenile argonet had managed to squish itself up that way last year, and what about when the first mals circled all the way around through the school and then tried to come back down the maintenance shaft? As soon as a bottleneck developed, a mass of them would build up in the hall and eventually they’d start eating us after all.

No one had any good ideas, but we hauled out the big official school blueprints and spread them out onto the table to try to find a solution, and discovered to our confusion that there were two enormous shafts in the blueprints, right there on opposite sides of the graduation hall, each one wide enough for seven argonets to climb up and come down again on the other side if they liked.

I assure you that there had absolutely never been two enormous shafts on the blueprints before, or for that matter in the school.

But when we grabbed another set of blueprints off one of the walls, the shafts were there, too, and after we got a third and still they were there, one of the maintenance-track kids said suddenly, “There are pieces of machinery that weren’t here when the school was built, but they’re too big to have come up the maintenance shaft. The school must have bigger shafts that only get opened for major installations.”

Chloe sat up. “Wait, that’s right, I remember this! All the new cafeteria equipment—when they were ready to install it, New York built like a hundred golems to deliver it. The golems opened the gates from outside, blasted the whole hall with mortal flame from flamethrowers, and then charged in with the new equipment. They shoved it into a shaft and closed it again before they got ripped apart. And then the kids inside installed it.”

I didn’t ask how many of those kids had been slaughtered by the minor horde of mals that would surely have got upstairs in the time it took for a gang of golems to load equipment into a shaft. New York’s golems do have a reputation for being quicker than usual, but that means they could go thundering across the graduation hall in six minutes instead of twenty. I didn’t ask if all the kids in the school had been warned to expect the sudden influx. I’m sure Chloe wouldn’t have been told those parts of the story. You wouldn’t trouble a nice, warmhearted girl with that kind of information.

I didn’t ask, I just seethed about it while stomping all the way downstairs to the workshop level with a handful of volunteers—kids I didn’t know very well who’d only been hanging round the library looking for work because they hadn’t done very much that day and were anxious about getting into dinner—to confirm that yes, these helpful shafts were in fact there, one ending in the workshop and one in the gym, and both were wide open. They looked a lot more impressive in person than on the blueprints. It’s hard to remember just how bloody big this place is until you’re standing on the edge of a shaft, easily big enough for a jet plane, that just goes plummeting down for half a mile. An army of mals could sail up no bother.

“I don’t suppose it occurred to you to keep them shut until the enclavers bothered to give everyone a warning?” I demanded of the nearest framed blueprints—the shafts were showing on there now as well—while my company all nervously took their own peeks down to help make sure that the shafts were there. “Not very much for fairness, are you?”

The school didn’t answer me. But I already knew the answer. It didn’t weigh people up one after another and even the score. It would do its best to protect an enclaver kid as much as a loser, and it wouldn’t care that the enclavers had come in with a basketful of advantages. They still hadn’t been safe, after all. That was the only line it drew, the line between safe and not safe, before it doled out its help with an implacable unjust evenhandedness. And it expected me to do the same, and it made me angry even while I couldn’t see any way to do it better.

I seethed all the way back upstairs to the library—my mood wasn’t improved by having to climb back up all those stairs—and announced, “The shafts are open,” before I threw myself sullenly into a chair.

---

After that, Liu’s plan was the plan, the only one we were working on, which was just as well, since it took every last minute of the last weeks—of what might be the last term ever—to get it into shape. Almost everything we’d done already had to be done again. Half of the first round of hastily built speakers broke and had to be replaced; we had to redo a quarter of the cabling, and then we had to make nearly a hundred new coils just to go up and down the shafts. We weren’t sure where to safely get the materials until someone suggested the walls of the gigantic auditorium where we take Maleficaria Studies, which are plastered all over with a horrible educational mural of all the mals which are normally waiting below to eat us.

I hadn’t been inside since last year, and I hadn’t missed it, but I took a day off from singing practice to join in for the festival of destruction. I wasn’t the only one. Hundreds of kids showed up; the younger kids were actually still going to lessons, but a lot of them skived off to join in and help as much as they could. We tore the place completely apart. Alchemists were there pouring precious etching fluids onto the bolts; incanters heated and cooled the panels to warp them until they fell off. Kids were flying themselves to the ceiling and prying panels off there, yelling out warnings below as they dropped. Even the freshmen—dramatically more gangly than they’d been at the start of the year—were there just whacking away at the seats with ordinary hammers in a frenzy. By the time the lunch bell rang, the room was gutted down to the girders and pipes.

Liu’s plan had that one significant advantage over any other: we all wanted to destroy the Scholomance. I’m not even joking; the fact that we all loved the idea on a deeply visceral level would almost certainly help carry it off. And it wasn’t just resentment and spite working in us, although that would have been enough: I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here. And every last one of us, from the most blithe freshman to the most crumpled senior, was longing more violently with every passing day to get out, out, out.

Well, except for our one special loony. Orion got increasingly sullen as July 2 crept closer. If he’d been resentful over the task he’d been assigned in our delightful scheme—he was going to be guarding the shaft that came down, facing the entire horde of mals at once—I would have considered it entirely justified. Since he didn’t mind his assignment in the slightest and in fact seemed to be looking forward to it in some weird demented anticipation, I had no idea what was bothering him.

That wasn’t true, of course, but I wasn’t allowing myself to have an idea what might be bothering him. He hadn’t asked me on another date since the disastrous attempt in the gym, which might have been out of mortification or because we hadn’t had a single day to ourselves since.

Either way, it was just as well. I came in here and I’ve survived in here being sensible all the time, trying to always do the cleverest thing I could manage, to see all the clear and sharp-edged dangers from every angle, so I could just barely squeeze past them without losing too much blood. I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive and useless as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway. I’m too good at being hard, I’ve got so good at it, and I wasn’t going to go soft all of a sudden now. I wasn’t going to make Mum’s choice, wasn’t going to do something stupid because of a boy who’d come and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with me in the library, the two of us alone in a pool of light in the reaching dark all around—a boy who improbably thought I was just grand and who made my stomach fold itself over into squares when he was near me.

Everyone else was doing stupid things all round me—that whole last week, I was constantly stumbling over people making out in the library stacks, and making mealtime trades for condoms or alchemical brews of dubious efficacy, and even otherwise sensible people were giggling to each other in the girls’ about their plans for dramatic last-night hurrahs, which was stupider than anything else; you weren’t going to catch me losing sleep the night before we tried to carry out this insane scheme, even if Orion Lake turned up at my door with tea and cake.

While I spent my days with Liu and Aadhya and Zixuan in the workshop, tuning the lute and singing my lungs out, Orion was still doing runs in the gym. He’d be spending most of graduation protecting the queue, unless the horde of mals managed to circulate through the entire school and come back down before we were all out, in which case—well, in which case he’d presumably make a hopeless but nevertheless determined stand at the barricades, trying to hold the mals off long enough for everyone else to make their escape. And I’d have to go on standing there next to the gates, singing the mals onwards, keeping them off everyone else, as he was inevitably overrun and torn apart before my eyes by the monsters I’d lured in to kill him.

I couldn’t stop myself going by the gym to watch him, just to poke the sore place. It didn’t make me feel any better to watch him thrashing scores of fake mals and gym constructs. I knew he was good at killing mals, I knew he was brilliant at it, but if this plan even worked, there wouldn’t be scores, there would be hundreds, maybe thousands, all piling on him at once. But I watched from the doors anyway, every day after I finished practicing, and when he finished his last run we went up to dinner together without talking, my teeth clenched round the words I wanted to say: You don’t have to do this alone; you can ask for people to help you, at least to shield you; we’ll hold a lottery, we’ll draw straws. I’d said them already and he’d just waved them away with a shrug and “They’ll just get in the way,” and he might very well be right, because no one would stick beside him with that horde coming. No one except me, and I was meant to be saving everyone else, everyone else but him.

But the last day before graduation, we decided it was best to rest my voice instead of more practice, and after lunch, I didn’t go back to the workshop; I marched down to the gym and told Orion I was going to do the last run with him. He was just outside the doors getting ready, whistling cheerily as he dusted his hands with casting powder—like gymnastics chalk, only with more glitter—and he had the gall to object. “I thought you were supposed to get some rest,” he said. “You don’t need to worry, I’m not going to let the mals get to you…” at which point he caught my expression and hastily said, “Uh, sure, let’s go.”

“Let’s,” I said.

The exercise did make me feel better, even if it shouldn’t have. As patently stupid as that was, five minutes into the onrushing horde that the Scholomance threw at us, I was as viscerally sure of invincibility as Orion: we could do it, we could, nothing would stop us—and of course nothing would until something did, at which point we’d be dead and past the bother of learning our lesson. But I let myself have the luxury of insane confidence while we mowed through maleficaria together, passing the work between us with the easy grace of partners dancing, my vast killing spells clearing great swaths around us and his shocking-quick attacks knocking down anything that dared to survive or poke its nose in any closer.

He lunged to one side of me to take out a swinging rack of crystalline blades and then instantly whirled to the other to vaporize the billowing violet-pink cloud of a glinder, finishing the sweep in close to me, and when he grinned down at me, breathing hard and sweaty and sparkling, I laughed back, helplessly, and threw a wall of flame spiraling out round us both, a swarm of treeks exploding like tiny fireworks as it caught them, half a dozen scuttling constructs melting into glistening puddles of liquid metal, and the course was done: we were alone in the hazy sunlit warmth beneath a stand of delicate purple-red maples. A moment later, an unnaturally perfect rumble of thunder sounded and a sudden torrent of warm summer rain came down to wash away the detritus—which wouldn’t have been unpleasant, except the pipes for the gym had evidently been infested, too, and quite a lot of amphisbaena came with the downpour, thrashing and hissing as they tumbled. Orion grabbed my hand and ran for the small pavilion, and he pulled me inside and kept pulling me into his arms and kissed me.

I kissed him back, I couldn’t help it. The soft pattering rain wasn’t real, except for the amphisbaena thumping down at intervals; the beautiful trees and the garden weren’t real, the pavilion wasn’t real, they were all just awful hollow lies, but he was real: his mouth and his arms round me and his body overheated against me, trickles of rain and sweat trapped against my cheek and his breath gasping out of the sides of his mouth even as he tried to keep kissing me, wanting me, his heart pounding so hard I could feel it through my chest, unless that was my own heart.

He’d buried his hands in my hair to kiss me more and I was clutching at his back, and then his t-shirt came apart under my grip, all at once the way clothes do when you’ve mended them with not enough raw material. He flinched back as the scraps fell off him, my hands slipping off him, and we were staring at each other across the opened space, both of us panting.

He jerked his head away first, his face wrenched and miserable, and he was about to say he was sorry; I could tell. I should have been sorry, too, because it was stupid and I knew better, even without Mum telling me keep far away from Orion Lake, except standing there with only hours left ticking down, it suddenly wasn’t stupid anymore. It was in fact the only sensible thing to do, because he might be dead tomorrow or I might, and I’d never know what it would be like to be with him; clumsy and awkward and terrible as it was likely to be, I’d never know, and I said, “Don’t even, Lake,” before he could open his mouth, and I stepped in close and grabbed him by the waist and said fiercely, “I want to. I want to,” and kissed him.

He groaned and put his arms round me again and kissed me back, and then he jerked away from me again, turning aside, and said cracking, “El, I do too, I want to, so much, I just—”

“I know you’re a mad optimist who thinks he can kill all the mals in the world, but I’m not,” I said. “And even if I were, if I knew for certain we’d make it, I still don’t want to wait until we’re out of here, on opposite sides of the ocean. I don’t want to wait!” I wanted his body back against me, the wave of heat back and rising higher, and it was so amazingly clear and obvious to me now that I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to, which wasn’t particularly fair of me, but I still couldn’t help taking a step towards him, reaching out.

He wouldn’t look at me. “I’m just—I’m so low.”

“What?” I said, confused, because it didn’t make any sense.

“I’m really low. There’s almost no mals, and they’re all coming at seniors, so everyone’s just taking them out for themselves. Magnus gave me some this morning, but…”

He trailed off: I think my eyebrows had packed bags and migrated three counties north. “If that’s dependent on mana, it’s news to me,” I said, with a pointed look in the appropriate direction, and immediately cursed Aadhya’s mum again in my head, because obviously I couldn’t help going straight to secret pet mal and I wanted to start howling with laughter in Orion’s face, which didn’t seem likely to advance my cause when he was squinched with mortification already.

But in a moment I stopped caring, because he blurted out, “You said—Luisa, you said Jack got at Luisa because—because she let—”

I gawked at him in outrage. “You think I’m going to drain you? Here’s news for you, Lake, if I wanted to—”

“No!” he yelled. “I think I’m going to—”

I didn’t let him finish, rising to a proper howl. “What, like one of the bloody mals?”

“No!” he said hurriedly, raising his hands as he backed away from me.

“That’s right, no,” I said—I don’t think I literally had steam coming off me, but I certainly felt as though I did—“so get back over here and kiss me again, and if you do try to drain my mana, I’ll tear off one of the doors and beat you senseless.” Orion heaved an enormous gasp like I’d hit him in the belly, and came across the pavilion in a rush towards me.

I’d grown two inches this year, but he’d grown six, and when he gripped my arms and pulled me in, with all his strength and power, I had a dizzy top-of-the-roller-coaster moment of wait I’m not ready—of course I’d managed to completely avoid that while I’d been busy talking him into it—but then he was kissing me, and the roller coaster went and I was gone along with it, flying between terror and delight. We got my t-shirt awkwardly pulled over my head, each of us with one hand involved in the project, and he squeezed his eyes shut and pulled me in closer to kiss me, I think so he didn’t embarrass himself by gaping at my breasts. But the shock of being up against him like that, all of our naked skin pressed so close, ran through me, and I stopped kissing him and started fighting with my old knotted string belt, because I wanted more, more, more of that, yes, so desperately.

He backed up a step to undo his own belt and wrestle himself out of his trousers—along with his secret pet mal, and I did start laughing helplessly, possibly in hysterics, but thankfully he thought I was just laughing about how my stupid belt wouldn’t come undone, and he grabbed it on either side of the knot and said, “Now untie, open by,” which had no business working, but did. My combats fell straight down and puddled round my ankles, since I’d bought them two years ago off the biggest senior boy who hadn’t anyone else willing to buy them, and I tripped over them while I was heeling my Velcro sandals off.

We tumbled together down onto our heap of clothing. Orion was panting as he carefully lay down on me full-length, bracing himself up on his forearms. I was deeply preoccupied with having him between my legs, the feeling inside my own body, a drumbeat pulsing sensation already going, and then the bastard looked down at me with his entire heart crammed into his eyes and his face and said, barely a whisper, “Galadriel.”

I hate my name, I’ve hated my name my whole life; everyone who ever said it and looked at me and smiled, it’s packed full of their smiles. Mum was the only one who didn’t think it was a good joke. Even she wouldn’t have saddled me with it if she hadn’t been a shattered child herself at the time, clinging to a scrap of dreaming that had helped her make it out of the dark, without thinking about what it would mean to make me carry that name around. But Orion said it like he’d been holding it in his mouth for a year, an unreal vision he hardly believed he’d found, and I wanted to cry and also thump him at the same time, because I didn’t want to like it.

“Don’t get soppy on me, Lake,” I said, trying not to let it wobble.

He paused and then gave me a wide, obnoxious smirk, settling himself down on his forearms as if he meant to make himself comfortable. “We might not make it tomorrow, right? So if this is my only chance—”

“Your chances are rapidly diminishing,” I said, and then I locked my leg over his and twisted him over with me on top, and he let out something between a laugh and a desperate gasp for air, and caught my hips, and after that we were just gone, an endless lush wonderful grappling as we arranged ourselves—the slide of his thigh against the inner skin of my own, the urgent sensation of his hardened muscled body working so perfectly with mine. We hadn’t very much idea of what we were doing—I’d got all sorts of detailed and educational materials from Mum obviously, but the pictures and diagrams and descriptions didn’t really convey anything of what it was actually like trying to fit two bodies together. I don’t think Orion had even as much of an idea as I did; I’m sure there was a sensible amount of sex ed in his past, and equally sure he’d ignored it entirely.

But we didn’t need any real idea—there wasn’t any goal in mind, I was so preoccupied with the dizzy glee of having dived in that I didn’t care about getting anywhere. Which was just as well, because he came less than five minutes into the festivities, and then went into a spiral of writhing and apologies until I punched him in the shoulder and said, “Come on, Lake, if that’s the best you’ve got, I’m leaving you and going to lunch,” and he laughed again and kissed me some more and then followed my pointed hints until I’d had an equally good time, and then he moved back up on top of me and we moved together and it was—too many things to name all of them, with the sticky physical pleasure the least of them, far behind the sheer relief of walls tumbling down, giving in to my own hunger, the joy of feeding his, and if that hadn’t been enough, the unbelievable bliss of not thinking, of not worrying, for at least one glorious stretch of mindlessness.

Which worked really effectively until afterwards, when we were lying together sweaty and, at least in my case, incredibly pleased with myself: I felt I’d accomplished something unique and magical, that, unlike all the other actually unique and magical things I can do, wasn’t horrifying or monstrous in the least. I was draped over his chest and he had his arms round me, which would become intolerably uncomfortable at some point that wasn’t now, and then he sucked in a deep gasping breath and said, “El, I know you don’t want to talk about—if we make it out of here, but I can’t—” and his voice was cracking on the edge of tears, not just leaky sentiment but like he was barely holding on to keep from bursting into sobs, so I couldn’t stop him, and because I didn’t, he said, “You’re the only right thing I’ve ever wanted.”

I had my cheek pillowed on him, and you couldn’t have paid me to look him in the face at that moment. I stared hard at the drain instead, from which any number of helpful maleficaria could have burst and didn’t. “If no one’s mentioned this to you before, you’ve got really odd taste,” I said, and wished I didn’t mean it quite as much as I did.

“They have,” he said, so flatly I did have to look at him. He was staring up into the dark recesses of the pavilion ceiling with a muscle jumping along the side of his jaw, a blind look in his face. “Everyone has. Even my mom and dad…They always thought something was wrong with me. Everyone was always nice to me, they were grateful, but—they still thought I was weird. My mom was always trying to get me to be friends with the other kids, telling me I had to control myself. And then when they gave me the power-sharer and I drained the whole enclave…”

Every word out of his mouth was stoking my already substantial desire to show up on his enclave’s doorstep and set the entire place on fire. “They made it feel as though it were all your fault, and that as a result you owed it to all the rest of them to dump the mana you get, all on your own, into their bank, and accept whatever bits they like to dribble back out to you in exchange,” I said through my teeth. “Which, by the way, is the only reason you’re low on mana in the first place. You’d still be aglow—”

“I don’t care about the mana!” He shifted and I got myself out of the way to let him get up; he went and sat on the steps, looking out into the still-falling amphisbaena rain. I grabbed my t-shirt—the New York one he’d given me, which came down to mid-thigh on me—and put it on and went and sat next to him. He had his elbows on his knees and was hunched over as if he couldn’t bear watching my face, whatever he’d see on it when he told me about his horrible evil self who’d swallowed this swill from everyone round him so long that he couldn’t even tell the taste was rotten. “I like the hunting. I like going after the mals, and—” He swallowed. “—and taking them apart and pulling the mana out of them. And I know that’s creepy—”

“Shut your bloody mouth,” I said. “I’ve seen creepy, Lake; I’ve been inside creepy, and you’re nothing like.”

He said softly, “That’s not true. You know it’s not. In the gym, when those kids tried to kill you—”

“Us,” I said pointedly.

“—you wouldn’t have hurt them,” he went on, without a pause. “And I—I wanted to kill them. I wanted to. And it did freak you out. I’m sorry,” he added, low.

I said in measured tones, “Lake, I’m useless at this nonsense, but as my mum’s not here at the moment, I’m just going to feed you her lines. Did you kill them?”

He gave me an annoyed look that no one ever gives Mum when she’s gently leading them along, so I don’t think I’d got the tone quite right, but that was his own fault picking me for an agony aunt. “That’s not the point.”

“I think they’d agree with me that it is. I’ve wanted to kill loads of people. But wanting can’t do harm without a pair of hands behind it.”

He gave a shrugging heave of shoulders and arms. “The point is, I never wanted normal things. And that’s not my parents’ fault, okay? You can be mad at them if you want to be, but—”

“Thanks, I will.”

He snorted. “Yeah. I know you think they’re jerks for letting me hunt when I was little. They aren’t. That’s why they’re not jerks. Because that’s all I ever wanted to do. They tried to stop me. I’m not just saying that. You think Magnus is spoiled? They gave me anything I looked at for more than three seconds. Toys or books or games…I didn’t want any of it. When I was ten, I started sneaking out of school to hunt. So my dad—my dad, who’s one of the top five artificers in New York—literally quit working and hung out with me all day, trying to teach me himself, doing stupid kid projects with me in his home workshop. And I was mad at him for it. After a couple of months, I threw a gigantic freakish tantrum because he wasn’t letting me hunt. I wrecked the whole shop, part of our apartment, chunks of major artifice projects…and then I ran away and hid down in the enclave sewage pipes. When my mom found me, she made me a deal: if I stayed in school all day and did all my homework and did a playdate every Saturday, on Sundays they’d let me take a gate shift and fight real mals. I cried I was so happy.”

I scowled over this confessional torrent. I was really disinclined to be sympathetic to his parents, for what I had to acknowledge were many grotesquely selfish reasons, which was making it hard for me to winkle out the other reasons I still didn’t like it. I did have to admit they had a right to struggle with a ten-year-old whose only idea of a good time was taking the guard duty shifts that otherwise would go to the best fighters that New York’s mana could hire. Their gates would attract at least as many mals as the school on a daily basis, if not more. The Scholomance isn’t in a major metropolitan area with five or six entrances, wizards coming and going the entire day. Ten years on a guard shift is enough to earn you an enclave spot; the only problem is very few people survive to claim it.

But Orion was saying, with perfect sincerity, “It made everything so much better. Then at least people liked me for wanting it, even if they still thought I was weird. And then here—”

“And why did they even send you?” I interrupted, still looking for something to be angry about. “Just to look out for the other kids? You didn’t need protecting.”

“They weren’t going to,” Orion said. “I wanted to come. I know everyone else hates school. But I don’t. The Scholomance—the Scholomance is the best place I’ve ever been.”

I emitted an involuntary gargled noise of outrage.

He huffed a little. “Yeah, see, even you think I’m weird. But it is. I could do the one thing I wanted and also be doing something right, all the time. I wasn’t just weird and creepy. I got to be—a hero.” I grimaced; that wasn’t on the nose or anything. “Except whenever people tried to say thanks, or anything, I always felt like it was a giant lie. Because they thought I was being brave, and if they knew I liked it, they’d be weirded out, just like everyone from home. And yeah, I thought something was probably going to get me at graduation, because I wasn’t going to go until after everyone else was out—”

He delivered this statement with all the agonized soul-searching and drama of someone announcing he’d go for a nice walk; I suffered a burst of private irritation that died very abruptly when he said, “—but I didn’t really care.”

I stared at him stricken.

“I didn’t want to die,” he hastened to tell me, as if that was an enormous improvement. “I just wasn’t scared of it, either. I didn’t have a plan except to kill mals until one of them got me, so why not in here? I’d get to help so many kids, not just my own enclave. I didn’t really know about that stuff, you know,” he added abruptly. “Not until I met you. I sort of assumed everyone lived someplace like New York. Even after I met Luisa, I thought she had it really bad, not that we had it so much better. But it made sense to me anyway. Why should I run out on everyone just to go home and hang out on New York’s gate until something got me there? I didn’t want anything else. Not like normal people—”

I grabbed his near hand, gripping tight. “Stop it!” I said, on the verge of shrieking incoherently. I knew that wouldn’t be helpful, but helpful felt so far beyond my reach, it might as well have been on the moon, so I was tempted to go the other way instead.

My whole childhood, everyone always wanted me to be more like Mum, told me I ought to be; the only person who didn’t was Mum herself. But that insidious message didn’t manage to get too deeply into my head, because I was always wanting her to be more like me. Less generous, less patient, less kind—and I don’t even mean I wanted her to be those things to other people; I’d have been wildly glad if she’d ever have stooped to have a screaming match with me. But right now, with every fiber of my being, I wanted to have all her answers inside me: her clear understanding, what she would have said, the light she’d have shone for Orion onto the despair twisted like dark vines through his head, so he could see it and cut it out of himself and open up the room to grow. The only answer I had to give him was setting New York on fire, and much as I wished otherwise, I could tell that really wasn’t an answer to his problem.

“There’s no such thing as normal people,” I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.”

“El, come on,” Orion said, with a weary air of being much put upon. I could have frothed in his face. “You know it’s not true. There are normal people, and we’re not. I’m not.”

“Yes, we are!” I said. “And you do want things other than hunting. You’re sorry enough if you miss a meal, and you minded when I was mean to you, and you certainly seemed reasonably interested in the events of the past hour—”

He huffed a short laugh. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

“The only thing you’ve tried to tell me so far is that you’re a hollowed-out suit of armor marching steadily onward through the ranks of mals whilst insensible to all human emotion, so I’m not keen on listening to anything else you’ve got to say!” I said.

“I’m trying to tell you that I was,” he said. “I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t know how to want anything else. Until—”

“Lake, don’t you even dare,” I said, appalled as the full horror dawned on me, but it was too late.

He still had my hand entwined with his; he brought it to his mouth and kissed the side of it softly, without looking at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s not fair, El. But I just need to know. I never had a plan except to go home and kill mals. I never wanted anything else. But now I do. I want you. I want to be with you. I don’t care if it’s in New York or Wales or anywhere else. And I just need to know if that’s okay. If I can—if I can have that. If you want that, too.

“And you don’t need to lie to me,” he added. “I’m not going to do anything different tomorrow, no matter what you tell me. I don’t think I could. Once I’m fighting, I just go flat-out and keep going; you know that’s how it works. I’m not going to play it safe if you say yes, and I’m not going to do anything dumb if you say no.”

“What you mean is, you’ll do an enormous number of truly stupid things no matter what!” I said, mostly on reflex; the rest of my brain was running around in circles making noises like Precious in a rage.

“Sure, whatever,” Orion said. “This isn’t about graduation. It’s about after. After I’m home, and I know—Chloe told me you won’t come to New York. So I need to know if I can get on a plane and come to you. Because that’s what I want to do. I can deal with graduation, I can deal with the mals. I just can’t deal with being out, trying to reach you when you don’t even have a freaking cellphone, and not knowing if it’s okay for me to—”

“Yes!” I said, in a despairing howl. “Yes, fine, you utter wanker, you can come to Wales and meet my mum,” and then, I didn’t add, he could also be shut up in the yurt for a year until she had cleared the rubbish out of his skull, and if this was what Mum had been warning me about, if she didn’t want me bringing her a shedload of work to do, it was just too bad.

I told myself that mostly because I had a dreadful feeling that this was what Mum had been warning me about. I couldn’t help knowing she would have told me off for giving him the least encouragement, in the strongest terms possible for her, and also that she’d be absolutely right: I hadn’t any business agreeing to be with someone who told me in all sincerity that I was his only hope of happiness in the world, at least not until he’d sorted his own head out and diversified.

But I’d told him the truth. I did want that, too: I wanted him to get on a plane and come to me, and I wanted to live happily ever after with him in a clean and shining world we’d purge of maleficaria and misery, and apparently I wasn’t a sensible realist after all, since I was leaping after that outrageous fantasy with both hands, straight into the chasm I could see perfectly well open before me.

“I do have plans, though,” I added, to distract myself from my own stupidity. “You might be perfectly satisfied to roam the wilds hunting and then come home to the little woman at night, Lake; it won’t do for me,” and I told him half defiantly about my enclave-building project, except it only made matters worse. He kept that horrible shining look on me the entire time; not even smiling, just holding my hand in his and listening to me go on and on getting progressively more fanciful, littering the whole world with tiny enclaves, sheltering every wizard child born, until finally I burst out, “Well? Haven’t you anything to say about it? Go on and tell me I’m mad; I don’t want humoring.”

“Are you kidding me?” he said, his voice cracking. “El, this school was the best thing I could imagine. But now when I hunt, I’ll be helping you do this,” as if I’d laid a gift in his hands.

I let out a strangled sob and said, “Lake, I hate you so much,” and put my head down against his shoulder with my eyes shut. I’d been ready to go down to the graduation hall and fight for my life; I’d been ready to fight for the lives of everyone I knew, for the chance of a future. I didn’t need this much more to lose.